Dreams, visions and other illusions

“I’m just hoping that they are either shocking enough, weird enough or interesting enough for people to stop, look, think and come up with their own vision of what this is,” said Keith Dillon about his artwork, on display in the MHCC Fireplace Gallery starting today through May 29.

Dillon’s work consists of surreal images that are photographs that have been manipulated in Photoshop. They depict images of a surreal nature. “Basically, they usually start out as a dream or just a vision or something and then they develop from there,” he said.

“Maybe we have to take reality and do what I do, and twist it a little bit to bring us back to real reality of what’s really important (which is) people, and the people in your life and community,” he said about the point of his images. “It’s about love, it’s about community, it’s about sharing with people and trying to make this world better.”

Dillon’s photography is his career and his focus. “I’ve shot millions of images in my 30 years, but I can remember almost everything I shoot,” he said.

Before getting into photography, Dillon was a painter. “I was an artist, a painter, and I worked in three-dimensional paintings and then I was sitting in a studio one day and decided to myself ,‘You know, I’m sitting here by myself painting. It’s getting kind of lonely,’” he recalled.

He got acquainted with the work of a photographer called “Art Kane” who had work in “Life” and “Look” magazines. “I thought, ‘You know, this guy is doing something like what I like to do,’ so I went and got a used camera and started taking pictures.”

Dillon worked as a commercial photographer for 30 years. “I worked in advertising and public relations, I even did stints of doing newspaper photo-journalism (and fashion)… pretty much the whole gamut.”

He started working with digital photography with the U.S. Army. “The Army (was among the first wave) to go digital,” he said. Dillon went to work with the Army after a job downsizing at AT&T, where he had hoped for digital photography training.

The Army was impressed with Dillon’s work, so they took him on, and sent him to school to learn how to use a digital camera and work with computers.

The first digital camera he used cost about $27,000. It “was a Nikon body with a Kodak chip in it. It was only 6.5 megapixels and it was a dog because the software wasn’t figured out, so we had to figure out,” he said.

The head of the department and Dillon learned by experimenting. “What happened — you took the camera under controlled conditions, like in the studio where you took a white balance (and) it would be great,” he said. “(When) you took it outside and shot a picture this way and then turned it (and) shot a picture that way, they would be two different colors.”

Dillon’s current projects start with a 10-day camping trip where he spends his time just taking pictures. “I photograph lots of things not knowing what I’m going to do with them. Just whatever catches my eye, I photograph.

“I like nature, I spend time with that — when I do these trips, I’ll decide to go in some area where I’m gonna have a choice of some different environments, of some different interesting things,” he said.

“I’ll travel to different parts of that area shooting images because there’s gonna be something there that I can get — so I kind of connect that whole thing as ‘it’s a circle,’ we are in a universe that’s a circle constantly. I think there could be, as we’re talking here, we could be five dimensions going around, where we’re in different places and different people, and I think somehow that influences a lot of thought processes and how my thought processes work.”

Dillon explained that process: “I, literally, have trained myself where if I have an idea and it’s just an idea and I can’t get a visual part of that idea— or I’m working on something, and I have one part of it, but I can’t get the rest and see what it means — I can go and take a nap, and train myself to actually dream, and then in that process of dreaming, waking up sometime solving the vision problem,” he said.

From there, he manipulates the images using Photoshop. It never gets stale, he said.

“With this I don’t get bored. You can tell it’s all one theme in the sense that it’s my style, but the images are not connected to each other. They’re all visions, separate visions,” he said.

Among the images in the exhibit is a poster Dillon designed for a documentary titled “Hyacinth,” which features Max Schwartz, who starred in “First Love” (1964) which was directed by the late singer Jim Morrison, from “The Doors.”

“There’s a lot of hype about it because everybody wants to see his part in this film. It’s (“First Love”) a three-minute movie by Jim Morrison,” said Dillon.

“Everybody thinks Jim Morrison wanted to be a rock star. He never wanted to be a rock star, (the public) thought he wanted to be a poet, that was something that he wanted, but his main interest in life was becoming a filmmaker,” he said.

The film shows a satellite that has been in space for a long time, and no one knows where it came from. “No country known — America, Russia, China, admits to launching,” Dillon said. The image that will be used for the movie poster was not planned for the movie, but a colleague of Dillon liked it and felt  it was appropriate.

Dillon hopes his images will be noticed and will inspire conversation, he said. “The problem is we live in this computer age now, the average person seems thousands of images a day to the point where they’re immune to them. And my thing is that I want to make images that make people stop and look.

“It’s a way of communicating and my feeling about art is that if it’s not communicating something to me, then I’m not really interested in it.”

Dillon currently resides in Portland Ore.

The Fireplace Gallery in the Student Union is open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays.